Wyatt Earp

This acclaimed biography separates history from myth to reveal the man behind the enduring Western legend.

In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against everything from organized crime in the 1930s to al-Qaeda after 9/11. Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals here, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction—one created by none other than Earp himself.

The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasn’t wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man.

By 1900, Earp’s involvement as a referee in a fixed heavyweight prizefight brought him notoriety as a scoundrel. Determine to rebuild his reputation, he spent his last decades in Los Angeles, spinning yarns about himself for credulous silent film actors and directors. Isenberg argues that Hollywood’s embrace of Earp as a paragon of law and order was his greatest confidence game of all.

Finalist for the 2014 Weber-Clements Book Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America